Around the Yule Log

by Willis Boyd Allen

Show your claws!”

and then dodged around the corner in terror, although he had never been known to punish or even chide one of them, save by a dark look from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. Ah, a gloomy, silent, mysterious fellow he was, to be sure; and many a mother in that neighborhood frightened her child into good behavior by threatening to call in Old Claus.

One cold December evening, when the twilight had fallen early, hastened by leaden skies and a few shivering flakes of snow, he sat in his own room, solitary as usual, and even more than usually grim, for he was thinking over his past.

Now, thinking over one’s past may be a very cheerful occupation or a very gloomy one. Old Claus undoubtedly found his full of shadows.

He remembered how he was left an orphan, when still a small boy; how he had suffered from cold and want, and had been buffeted and scolded and ill-used, until he ran away from the people who had taken charge of him (he had no home nor friends); how he had worked hard, had saved his money, and had become a very rich man.

Still he had longed to be richer, and, retiring from regular business, he had gone far away to search for a sunken treasure in tropical seas. He had failed to find it, but more eager than ever, he mined for gold, without success. Again, it was the buried hoard of a pirate which attracted him; but months of fruitless labor had been thrown away in a vain attempt to discover exactly where it lay. So he had spent his years, always in search of a Treasure, which had become the ruling idea of his life; always disappointed; until, embittered, discouraged and alone in the world, though still rich, he had given up the pursuit.

The home he had chosen was as strange as the life he had lived; a huge, old-fashioned house, which had once been occupied by a wealthy family, but had long lain empty, save for the rats that scampered through its wide halls and gloomy chambers, and the spiders that spun their webs unhindered across the blurred window-panes.

The city had grown up about the house, and it was now part of a brick block. Indeed, one wing of the ancient building formed a portion of the tenement house next door, where it seemed as if men wrangled and staggered, and ragged women scolded and wept, and children cried from hunger and cold, all night long. But the walls were very thick, and the occupant of the lonely chamber heard them not.